The Woman War Correspondent The U S Military And The Press

Honorable Mention recipient for the American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award, this book outlines the rich history of more than 250 women who worked as war correspondents up through World War II, while demonstrating the ways in which the press and the military both promoted and prevented their access to war. Despite the continued presence of individual female war correspondents in news accounts, if not always in war zones, it was not until 1944 that the military recognized these individuals as a group and began formally considering sex as a factor for recruiting and accrediting war correspondents. This group identity created obstacles for women who had previously worked alongside men as “war correspondents,” while creating opportunities for many women whom the military recruited to cover woman’s angle news as “women war correspondents.” This book also reveals the ways the military and the press, as well as women themselves, constructed the concepts of “woman war correspondent” and “war correspondent” and how these concepts helped and hindered the work of all war correspondents even as they challenged and ultimately expanded the public’s understanding of war and of women.

Stringer, Ann: Carpenter, Iris: Cowan, Ruth.

An elite team of reporters brought the Great War home each week to ten million readers of The Saturday Evening Post. As America’s largest circulation magazine, the Post hired the nation’s best-known and best-paid writers to cover World War I. The Weekly War provides a history of the unique record Post storytellers created of World War I, the distinct imprint the Post made on the field of war reporting, and the ways in which Americans witnessed their first world war. The Weekly War includes representative articles from across the span of the conflict, and Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy complement these works with essays about the history and significance of the magazine, the war, and the writers. By the start of the Great War, The Saturday Evening Post had become the most successful and influential magazine in the United States, a source of entertainment, instruction, and news, as well as a shared experience. World War I served as a four-year experiment in how to report a modern war. The news-gathering strategies and news-controlling practices developed in this war were largely duplicated in World War II and later wars. Over the course of some thousand articles by some of the most prolific writers of the era, The Saturday Evening Post played an important role in the evolution of war reporting during World War I.

When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves--and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war. Chris Dubbs tells the fascinating stories of Edith Wharton, Nellie Bly, and more than thirty other American women who worked as war reporters. As Dubbs shows, stories by these journalists brought in women from the periphery of war and made them active participants--fully engaged and equally heroic, if bearing different burdens and making different sacrifices. Women journalists traveled from belligerent capitals to the front lines to report on the conflict. But their experiences also brought them into contact with social transformations, political unrest, labor conditions, campaigns for women's rights, and the rise of revolutionary socialism. An eye-opening look at women's war reporting, An Unladylike Profession is a portrait of a sisterhood from the guns of August to the corridors of Versailles. Purchase the audio edition.

During World War II, 127 women managed to obtain official accreditation from the U.S. War Department as war correspondents. In spite of U.S. military regulations that forbade women to cover combat, Martha Gellhorn, Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller, and many others found ways to get “where the action was.” Their tenacity, bravery, and fresh approach to reporting war news broke the gender barrier and opened the way for women journalists of today. This is the exciting story of what they did and how they did it—flying bombing missions, taking photographs inside Buchenwald, stowing away on D day hospital ships, dodging bullets on Iwo Jima, and much more. Penny Colman’s authoritative and exciting text also functions as an overview of the war and is profusely illustrated with up-front photos. From the Hardcover edition.

The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent. "Thrilling from the first page to the last." —Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women "Just as women are so often written out of war, so it seems are the female correspondents. Mackrell corrects this omission admirably with stories of six of the best…Mackrell has done us all a great service by assembling their own fascinating stories." —New York Times Book Review On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men. The Correspondents follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who got the scoop on Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine’s official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a “society girl columnist” turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first English journalist to break the news of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men. From chasing down sources and narrowly dodging gunfire to conducting tumultuous love affairs and socializing with luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Picasso, and Man Ray, these six women are captured in all their complexity. With her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for the scoop.

This book is " ...a whale of a war story," according to the Saturday Review of Literature. S.L.A. Marshall, the famous military historian for the War Department wrote that : "This Maggie's eye view of the Korean police action is downright irresistible in its candor, in its simple expression of the things which most of us feel strongly but can't say very well, in its change of pace between the tragedy of the battlefield and the high comedy of much of human behavior in close relationship to it....Many of her word pictures are remarkable in their ability to convey much in little; where she philosophizes at all about men in battle her style is almost epigrammatic, and many of her observations have such a true ring that they deserve to be remembered and widely quoted." This is a fast-paced, highly readable account of the first year of the Korean War—a time which was almost tragic for the Americans troops and the twenty million South Koreans involved. As the North Koreans launched a surprise attack across the border in 1950, Marguerite Higgins, a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune, joined a group of unprepared journalists and troops fleeing fast and far to survive. The border between North and South Korea was then, as it is now, the 38th parallel. This border which the North Koreans overrun had been the division between the Russian and American zones of occupation in Korea after the defeat of Japan in 1945. By the outbreak of the war in 1950, the Russians had withdrawn leaving control of North Korea in the hands of the first dictator in the North Korean dynasty,Kim II-sung. American troops were in South Korea at the time of the invasion but in limited numbers. The United States had not equipped its ally, the army of the Republic of Korea, with offensive weapons such as tanks. Without tanks to counter the North Korean armor, the US and Republic of Korea forces came very close to being swept out of Korea as you will see. Upon further research on the Korean War, you will find that Higgins’s reporting ends in the middle of the war. She writes about the major military actions at the start of the war: the initial Northern Korean invasion, the quick decision to rush U.S. occupation troops from Japan to Korea, the Marine landing at Inchon which pushed the Communists back, and the pursuit of the Communists into North Korea by American and R.O.K. troops which led to Chinese intervention. The Korean War was not a complete victory for South Korea, the United States and the other members of the United Nations which joined in the fight to save South Korea. At the armistice in 1953, Communists retained Korea north of the 38th parallel. You know from news reports what the North Korean regime has been like for the last 60 years. Nevertheless, much was accomplished by intervention of American military forces, and the sacrifices made by Army and Marine units in Korea, and their United Nations allies in the 1950s. The twenty million people living in South Korea in 1950 remained free from Communist tyranny. The book, of course, brings up the question of intervention by both Communist nations and the United States. As you will see the last chapters, Higgins witnessed the Russian takeover of Eastern Europe in the late 1950s. She was staunchly anti-Communist. But she also feared that the United States would not recognize how much former Asian colonies wanted to be free of colonization. She writes "we must turn our backs on colonization...America should put herself squarely on the side of those nations asking national independence and self-government, and do all she can to help them economically." To what extent was this good advice? Was the success of American intervention in Korea, and the failure of intervention in Vietnam related to this question? Out of respect for the dead American, Korean, and Vietnamese in these conflicts, does the study of these interventions deserve study in American high schools?

This is the hidden story of Australian and New Zealand women war reporters who fought for equality with their male colleagues and filed stories from the main conflicts of the twentieth century. In Australian Women War Reporters, Jeannine Baker provides a much-needed account of the pioneering women who reported from the biggest conflicts of the twentieth century. Two women covered the South African War at the turn of the century, and Louise Mack witnessed the fall of Antwerp in 1914. Others such Anne Matheson, Lorraine Stumm and Kate Webb wrote about momentous events including the rise of Nazism, the liberation of the concentration camps, the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the Cold War conflicts in Korea and Southeast Asia. These women carved a path for new generations of female foreign correspondents who have built upon their legacy. Jeannine Baker deftly draws out the links between the experiences of these women and the contemporary realities faced by women journalists of war, including Monica Attard and Ginny Stein, allowing us to see both in a new light.